Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?

[The New York Times Book Review, 28 October 1984, pp. 1, 40-41.]

As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming polarized into "literary" and "scientific" factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever "beyond" the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy, and access fee can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one's own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of a long-ago high-table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, "If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution." Such "intellectuals," for the most part "literary,' were supposed by Lord Snow, to be "natural Luddites."

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine
anybody these days wanting to be called a
literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so
bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, "people
who read and think." Being called a Luddite is
another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is
there something about reading and thinking that
would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite?
Is It O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of
it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

HISTORICALLY, Luddites flourished In Britain from
about 1811 to 1816. They were bands of men,
organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to
destroy machinery used mostly in the textile
industry. They swore allegiance not to any British
king but to their own King Ludd. It Isn't clear
whether they called themselves Luddites, although
they were so termed by both friends and enemies.
C.P. Snow's use of the word was clearly polemical,
wishing to imply an irrational fear and hatred of
science and technology. Luddites had, in this
view, come to be imagined as the counter-
revolutionaries of that "Industrial Revolution"
which their modern versions have "never tried,
wanted, or been able to understand."

But the Industrial Revolution was not, like
the American and French Revolutions of about the
same period, a violent struggle with a beginning,
middle and end. It was smoother, less conclusive,
more like an accelerated passage in a long
evolution. The phrase was first popularized a
hundred years ago by the historian Arnold Toynbee,
and has had its share of revisionist attention,
lately in the July 1984 Scientific American. Here,
in "Medieval Roots of the Industrial Revolution,"
Terry S. Reynolds suggests that the early role of
the steam m engine (1765)) may have been
overdramatized. Far from being revolutionary, much
of the machinery that steam was coming to drive had
already long been in place, having in fact been
driven by water power since the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, the idea of a technosocial
"revolution," in which the same people came out on
top as in France and America, has proven of use to
many over the years, not least to those who, like
C. P. Snow, have thought that In "Luddite"" they
have discovered a way to call those with whom they
disagree both politically reactionary and
anti-capitalist at the same time.

But the Oxford English Dictionary has an
interesting tale to tell. In 1779, in a village
somewhere in Leicestershire, one Ned Lud broke into
a house and "in a fit of insane rage" destroyed two
machines used for knitting hosiery. Word got
around. Soon, whenever a stocking-frame was found
sabotaged -- this had been going on, sez the
Encyclopedia Britannica, since about 1710 -- folks
would respond with the catch phrase "Lud must have
been here." By the time his name was taken up by
the frame-breakers of 1812, historical Ned Lud was
well absorbed into the more or less sarcastic
nickname "King (or Captain) Ludd," and was now all
mystery, resonance and dark fun: a more-than-human
presence, out In the night, roaming the hosiery
districts of England, possessed by a single comic
shtick --every time he spots a stocking-frame he
goes crazy and proceeds to trash it.

But it's important to remember that the target
even of the original assault of l779, like many
machines of the Industrial Revolution, was not a
new piece of technology. The stocking-frame had
been around since 1589, when, according to the
folklore, it was invented by the Rev. William Lee,
out of pure meanness. Seems that Lee was in love
with a young woman who was more interested in her
knitting than in him. He'd show up at her place.
"Sorry, Rev, got some knitting." "What, again?"
After a while, unable to deal with this kind of
rejection, Lee, not, like Ned Lud, in any fit of
insane rage, but let's imagine logically and
coolly, vowed to invent a machine that would make
the hand-knitting of hosiery obsolete, and so he
did. According to the encyclopedia, the jilted
cleric's frame "was so perfect in its conception
that it continued to be the only mechanical means
of knitting for hundreds of years."

Now, given that kind of time span, it's just
not easy to think of Ned Lud as a technophobic
crazy. No doubt what people admired and
mythologized him for was the vigor and single-
mindedness of his assault. But the words "fit of
insane rage" are third-hand and at least 68 years
after the event. And Ned Lud's anger was not
directed at the machines, not exactly. I like to
think of it more as the controlled, martial-arts
type anger of the dedicated Badass.

There is a long folk history of this figure,
the Badass. He is usually male, and while
sometimes earning the quizzical tolerance of women,
is almost universally admired by men for two basic
virtues: he Is Bad, and he is Big. Bad meaning not
morally evil, necessarily, more like able to work
mischief on a large scale. What is important here
is the amplifying of scale, the multiplication of
effect.

The knitting machines which provoked the first
Luddite disturbances had been putting people out of
work for well over two centuries. Everybody saw
this happening „- it became part of daily life.
They also saw the machines coming more and more to
be the property of men who did not work, only owned
and hired. It took no German philosopher, then or
later, to point out what this did, had been doing,
to wages and jobs. Public feeling about the
machines could never have been simple unreasoning
horror, but likely something more complex: the
love/hate that grows up between humans and
machinery „- especially when it's been around for a
while --not to mention serious resentment toward
at least two multiplications of effect that were
seen as unfair and threatening. One was the
concentration of capital that each machine
represented, and the other was the ability of each
machine to put a certain number of humans out of
work „- to be "worth" that many human souls. What
gave King Ludd his special Bad charisma, took him
from local hero to nationwide public enemy, was
that he went up against these amplified,
multiplied, more than human opponents and
prevailed. When times are hard, and we feel at the
mercy of forces many times more powerful, don't we,
in seeking some equalizer, turn, if only in
imagination, in wish, to the Badass -- the djinn,
the golem, the hulk, the superhero „- who will
resist what otherwise would overwhelm us? Of
course, the real or secular frame-bashing was still
being done by everyday folks, trade unionists ahead
of their time, using the night, and their own
solidarity and discipline, to achieve their
multiplications of effect.

It was open-eyed class war. The movement had
its Parliamentary allies, among them Lord Byron,
whose maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1812
compassionately argued against a bill proposing,
among other repressive measures, to make frame-
breaking punishable by death. "Are you not near the
Luddites?" he wrote from Venice to Thomas Moore.
"By the Lord! if there's a row, but I'll be among
ye! How go on the weavers -- the breakers of
frames -- the Lutherans of politics -- the
reformers?" He includes an "amiable chanson,"
which proves to be a Luddite hymn sop inflammatory
that it wasn't published until after the poet's
death. The letter is dated December 1816: Byron
had spent the summer previous in Switzerland,
cooped up for a while in the Villa Diodati with the
Shelleys, watching the rain come down, while they
all told each other ghost stories. By that
December, as it happened, Mary Shelley was working
on Chapter Four of her novel "Frankenstein, or the
Modern Prometheus."

If there were such a genre as the Luddite
novel, this one, warning of what can happen when
technology, and those who practice it, get out of
hand, would be the first and among the best.
Victor Frankenstein's creature also, surely,
qualifies as a major literary Badass. "I
resolved...," Victor tells us, "to make the being
of a gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight
feet in height, and proportionately large," which
takes care of Big. The story of how he got to be
so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered
innermost: told to Victor in the first person by
the creature himself, then nested inside of
Victor's own narrative, which is nested in its turn
in the letters of the arctic explorer Robert
Walton. However much of "Frankenstein's" longevity
is owing to the undersung genius James Whale, who
translated it to film, it remains today more than
well worth reading, for all the reasons we read
novels, as well as for the much more limited
question of its Luddite value: that is, for its
attempt, through literary means which are nocturnal
and deal in disguise, to deny the machine.

Look, for example, at Victor's account of how
he assembles and animates his creature. He must,
of course, be a little vague about the details, but
we're left with a procedure that seems to include
surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's
galvanic extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark
hints about Paracelsus and Albertus Magnus, the
still recently discredited form of magic known as
alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the
commonly depicted Bolt Through the Neck, is that
neither the method nor the creature that results is
mechanical.

This is one of several interesting
similarities between "Frankenstein" and an earlier
tale of the Bad and Big, "The Castle of Otranto"
(1765), by Horace Walpole, usually regarded as the
first Gothic novel. For one thing, both authors,
in presenting their books to the public, used
voices not their own. Mary Shelley's preface was
written by her husband, Percy, who was pretending
to be her. Not till 15 years later did she write
an introduction to "Frankenstein" in her own voice.
Walpole, on the other hand, gave his book an entire
made-up publishing history, claiming it was a
translation from medieval Italian. Only in his
preface to the second edition did he admit
authorship.

THE novels are also of strikingly similar
nocturnal origin: both resulted from episodes of
lucid dreaming. Mary Shelley, that ghost-story
summer in Geneva, trying to get to sleep one
midnight, suddenly beheld the creature being
brought to life, the images arising in her mind
"with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of
reverie." Walpole had been awakened from a dream,
"of which, all I could remember was, that I had
thought myself in an ancient castle... and that on
the uppermost bannister of a great stair-case I saw
a gigantic hand in armour."

In Walpole's novel, this hand shows up as the
hand of Alfonso the Good, former Prince of Otranto
and, despite his epithet, the castle's resident
Badass. Alfonso, like Frankenstein's creature, is
assembled from pieces -- sable-plumed helmet, foot,
leg, sword, all of them, like the hand, quite
oversized -- which fall from the sky or just
materialize here and there about the castle
grounds, relentless as Freud's slow return of the
repressed. The activating agencies, again like
those in "Frankenstein," are non-mechanical. The
final assembly of "the form of Alfonso, dilated to
an immense magnitude," is achieved through
supernatural means: a family curse, and the
intercession of Otranto's patron saint.

The craze for Gothic fiction after "The Castle
of Otranto" was grounded, I suspect, in deep and
religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles.
I ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th
century believed that once upon a time all kinds of
things had been possible which were no longer so.
Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of nature had
not been so strictly formulated back then. What
had once been true working magic had, by the Age of
Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's
dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that,
like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was
being more and more secularized into Deism and
nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of
God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily
resurrection, if possible -- remained. The
Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening
were only two sectors on a broad front of
resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which
included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as
Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way
expressed the same profound unwillingness to give
up elements of faith, however "irrational," to an
emerging technopolitical order that might or might
not know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code
for "medieval," and that has remained code for
"miraculous," on through Pre-Raphaelites, turn-of-
the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps
and comics, down to "Star Wars" and contemporary
tales of sword and sorcery.

TO insist on the miraculous is to deny to the
machine at least some of its claims on us, to
assert the limited wish that living things, earthly
and otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big
enough to take part in transcendent doings. By
this theory, for example, King Kong (?-1933)
becomes your classic Luddite saint. The final
dialogue in the movie, you recall, goes, "Well, the
airplanes got him." "No... it was Beauty killed
the Beast." In which we again encounter the same
Snovian Disjunction, only different, between the
human and the technological.

But if we do insist upon fictional violations
of the laws of nature -- of space, time,
thermodynamics, and the big one, mortality itself
-- then we risk being judged by the literary
mainstream as Insufficiently Serious. Being
serious about these matters is one way that adults
have traditionally defined themselves against the
confidently immortal children they must deal with.
Looking back on "Frankenstein," which she wrote
when she was 19, Mary Shelley said, "I have
affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy
days, when death and grief were but words which
found no true echo in my heart." The Gothic
attitude in general, because it used images of
death and ghostly survival toward no more
responsible end than special effects and cheap
thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined
to its own part of town. It is not the only
neighborhood in the great City of Literature so,
let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good
people always win. In romance novels, love
conquers all. In whodunits, murder, being a
pretext for a logical puzzle, is hardly ever an
irrational act. In science fiction, where entire
worlds may be generated from simple sets of axioms,
the constraints of our own everyday world are
routinely transcended. In each of these cases we
know better. We say, "But the world isn't like
that." These genres, by insisting on what is
contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so
they get redlined under the label "escapist fare."

This is especially unfortunate in the case of
science fiction, in which the decade after
Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings
of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our
history. It was just as important as the Beat
movement going on at the same time, certainly more
important than mainstream fiction, which with only
a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the
political climate of the cold war and McCarthy
years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of
the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to
have been one of the principal refuges, in our
time, for those of Luddite persuasion.

By 1945, the factory system -- which, more
than any piece of machinery, was the real and major
result of the Industrial Revolution -- had been
extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
German long-range rocket program and the death
camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major
gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of
development might plausibly converge, and before
too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watch nuclear
weapons multiply out of control, and delivery
systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited
range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a
holocaust [///] eight-figure body counts has become
[///] particularly since 1980, have been guiding
our military policies -- conventional wisdom.

To people who were writing science fiction in
the 50's, none of this was much of a surprise,
though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come
up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even
in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to
compare with what would happen in a nuclear war.
So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and
the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny
the machine taking a different direction. The
hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more
humanistic concerns -- exotic cultural evolutions
and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with
space/time, wild philosophical questions -- most of
it sharing, as the critical literature has amply
discussed, a definition of "human" as particularly
distinguished from "machine." Like their earlier
counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back
yearningly to another age -- curiously, the same
Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites
into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.

But we now live, we are told, in the Computer
Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility?
Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention
as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it.
Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy
word processors. Machines have already become so
user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of
Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old
sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead.
Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that
knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty
straightforward conversion between money and
information, and that somehow, if the logistics can
be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If
this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand
on common ground with their Snovian adversaries,
the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed
to have the "future in their bones." It may be
only a new form of the perennial Luddite
ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the
deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to
reside in the computer's ability to get the right
data to those whom the data will do the most good.
With the proper deployment of budget and computer
time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from
nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody,
detoxify the results of industrial greed gone
berserk -- realize all the wistful pipe dreams of
our days.

THE word "Luddite" continues to be applied
with contempt to anyone with doubts about
technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites
today are no longer faced with human factory owners
and vulnerable machines. As well-known President
and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower
prophesied when he left office, there is now a
permanent power establishment of admirals, generals
and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average
poor bastards are completely outclassed, although
Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all
supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on,
even though, because of the data revolution, it
becomes every day less possible to fool any of the
people any of the time.

If our world survives, the next great
challenge to watch out for will come -- you heard
it here first -- when the curves of research and
development in artificial intelligence, molecular
biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will
be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest
of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be
caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for
all good Luddites to look forward to if, God
willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as
Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and
cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised
song, in which he, like other observers of the
time, saw clear identification between the first
Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It
begins: